Curiosity is a car-sized, nuclear-powered rover that landed in Gale Crater in 2012 using the then-untested sky-crane maneuver. Its formal name is the Mars Science Laboratory, and it carries a full geochemistry lab: drills, ovens, spectrometers, and a laser that vaporizes rock from 20 feet away.
Since 2014 it has been climbing Mount Sharp, a 3-mile-high mound of layered sediment in the crater's center. Each layer is a page of Martian climate history, read in order as the rover ascends.
Curiosity settled the biggest question about early Mars: yes, it was habitable. It found an ancient lakebed with liquid water, key chemical ingredients for life, and organic molecules preserved in rock. Perseverance's hunt for actual biosignatures builds directly on that foundation.
Key Facts
- Landed
- August 6, 2012, Gale Crater
- Power
- Radioisotope generator (plutonium)
- Size
- About 1 ton, car-sized
- Key finding
- Ancient Mars was habitable
- Current work
- Climbing Mount Sharp's sediment layers
Timeline
November 2011
Launch from Cape Canaveral
August 2012
Sky-crane landing in Gale Crater, 'seven minutes of terror'
2013
Drilled samples confirm an ancient habitable lake
2014
Reaches the base of Mount Sharp
Next up
Continued ascent through younger rock layers
Latest Curiosity News
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4982–4987: Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
By Allison Dries-Padilla, Missions Operations Specialist at Malin Space Science Systems Earth planning date: Friday, Aug. 14, 2026 This week of Curiosity Mars rover operations takes us back to our “regularly scheduled pr
Curiosity
NASA’s Curiosity Mars Rover Discovers Field of Honeycomb Textures
As NASA’s Curiosity rover recently began climbing up a Martian valley nicknamed “Valle Grande,” it sent back images that were a familiar sight to mission scientists: honeycomb-like textures called polygonal fractures, ea
Curiosity
Facts last reviewed 2026-07-11. Official mission page: science.nasa.gov